by James Cole
“Not exactly sure,” Jeremy replied. “Somewhere between here and where Sticks River empties into the lake. That’s all I know.”
At first, the sound was barely discernable, like wind stirring high in the trees. A few minutes later, the current increased and the river banks grew into sheer rock walls that towered over both sides of the river but higher on the left side. They checked that their supplies were properly secured and strapped on the cheap orange life jackets. Never before had Jeremy thought a canoe so precarious a vessel, but it was all they had.
By now, the growling of The Devil’s Crotch rapids was unmistakable. Jeremy knelt in the front of the canoe, the position best suited to the person able to deliver more powerful strokes. For maneuverability, the canoe must maintain forward momentum relative to the moving water. His directive was simple: paddle as hard and fast as possible. It would be mostly up to Jinni to steer from the rear using the rudder action of her paddle blade.
When he was situated, Jeremy turned to steal a look at Jinni. Her fearful countenance fed his rising anxiety. He wondered, not for the first time, if it had been a mistake for them to come alone. Jeremy felt ill-prepared. He should have gotten more information from the clerk. Instead, his effort had focused on convincing the store clerk that they could handle it and on trying to prevent Jinni from hearing the clerk’s warning.
“Can we swing this?” Jinni’s voice seemed to emanate from a point farther away than the back seat of the canoe.
“We have to.”
Jeremy stretched his spine and his neck tall and in perfect perpendicularity to the plane of the water. He could see a definite drop-off dead ahead. He couldn’t judge its magnitude, but it sounded huge. Jeremy clinched the paddle as if it were a medieval battle ax, as he prepared to engage his foe, The Devil’s Crotch.
The first chute was straight and smooth, and the canoe slid through as slick as a puck on an air hockey table.
So far so good, Jeremy thought. A spontaneous wheeee… sounded from behind, but any glee was fleeting as the boat bumped down a rough section of whoop-dee-doos. Despite the fact that this was the roughest water they had experienced, the boat stayed straight and true, but its bucking was nerve-racking. The intensity meter swung to extreme at what came into view next. Up ahead, the river appeared to slam head-on into a rock wall. This was the source of the high-decibel roar. Jeremy’s heart beat against his chest wall and in his head like a bass drum.
Frantically he tried to discern the nature of the beast. Was it possible that the river somehow flowed under the rock wall? Would they be squashed against the rock like bugs on a windshield?
A second later, the illusion melted. It was not a dead end but rather a house-sized rock squatting in the middle of the channel, splitting the river in two. The water funneled furiously to either side, narrowing and thus accelerating the flow even more. It was not obvious if one side was less treacherous than the other but they were headed straight for the rock and turn they must. Since Jeremy was already paddling on his stronger right side, which automatically inclined the boat to the left, he screamed, “Left! Left! Hard left!”
Jeremy could only hope that Jinni heard him over the water’s roar as he dug his paddle into the froth, pulling with all his might. But the river had them in its cold steely grip and meant, it seemed, to crash them into the rock wall.
An even-keeled voice in his mind advised: Paddle harder or you’re not gonna make it.
The rock wall loomed large, larger than life, or perhaps as large as death itself. The canoe did not turn.
Jeremy screamed, “Hard left! HARDLEFT!”
He had no way of knowing if Jinni heard him or not. He couldn’t even be sure that she was still behind him. Jeremy’s panicked thoughts overflowed from his mind and poured into his vocal cords in synch with the brutal strokes of his paddle:
NOT…GONNA…MAKE IT… NOT... GONNA... MAKE IT…
At the last possible second, even as Jeremy’s body obtained maximum tension in anticipation of impact with the wall, the canoe turned. Jinni swung the rear of the canoe around like a pro. With a few more digs of the paddle, they passed by the left side of the rock but not without the canoe scraping an obnoxious squeal along the final 20 feet or so. They endured another drop and flopped awkwardly over another series of waves. A slight lull in the action gave Jeremy a few seconds to gather his thoughts and to look downstream. Smooth water beckoned in the not-too-far distance.
Take that Hillbilly Joe! We might just make it after all.
Out of nowhere a wall of water slammed into the right side of the boat. There was no way to recover. Jeremy had totally forgotten the other half of the river, the part that flowed around the right side of the rock island. The canoe capsized, catapulting its occupants over the side. From behind, Jinni’s scream cut off abruptly as Jeremy hit the water head-first and was immediately sucked under. The weight of the water swept him down as his body rolled and somersaulted violently.
Up, up, which way is up?!
Jeremy tried to swim to the surface, flapping his arms like a panicked chicken, but he had no idea which way was up. He was blind, and there was no up and no down. The river had him and there was nothing he could do but hope that he was not stuck in a re-circulating current, hope that this washing machine would not hold him under until his air ran out and his instinct to inhale overrode the knowledge that breathing river water is fatal and he would be drowned.
And what of Jinni? Had he sealed her fate? Would she die right here in The Devil’s Crotch on a Saturday in September? Was she breathing water even now? Had he in his arrogant stupidity murdered his soul mate, the love of his life?
Just when he thought his situation hopeless, the churning river beast released him to the surface. Free to breathe the air, Jeremy drifted up and down over the last throes of the rapids, a series of three or four standing waves. Once clear, Jeremy found himself alone, no canoe in sight.
And no Jinni either. At that moment, he remembered how Grady had warned him to steer clear of Reefers Woods, and for the first time, Jeremy admitted that it had been a mistake to come here.
He tried to call her name but he could only choke out river water.
When his voice worked again, he gargled out her name, “Jinni! Jinni!” but there was no reply.
Frantically, he scanned the water. There, in a lazy eddy thirty yards distant floated a shiny mass, something shimmering in the sunbeams.
Something blond.
Jeremy called out to her again but there was no answer. He swam furiously toward her and tried to be positive, but in his mind’s eye he imagined an awful image of his beloved Jinni, floating face down, her body here but her soul departed.
When he got to her, he still could see only her long hair, bobbing gently on the surface of the water.
“Oh no, Jinni. Oh no.”
When Jeremy could reach her, he pulled her toward him, meaning to pull her face from the water, ready to give her mouth-to-mouth, his insides screaming for him to bring her back. But she was not floating face down, as he originally thought. Jinni’s face had been there all along, hidden behind her thick locks. Gently he pushed back the hair to reveal her wide-open, blue eyes.
“Are you okay?” he asked. His feet felt the rocky bottom. It was shallow enough to stand here.
She nodded vigorously, the nodding of her head a complement to her chattering teeth. Jeremy had not noticed, but the water was very cold.
She’s alive. Thank God, she’s alive.
*****
At the tail end of The Devil’s Crotch, the river bank transitioned from sheer rock wall to low sloping bank. Jinni climbed out first with a little help from Jeremy. For once she didn’t object to his hand on her ass.
“Are you okay?” Jeremy asked for about the fifth time.
Finally she was able to speak again, the shock of the cold water and the scare wearing off a bit.
“Our canoe is getting away.”
Jeremy looked in the direction of J
inni’s gaze to see the boat’s dull silver bottom, floating like a dead fish in the water. It was in the middle of the river about 100 yards distant. Without hesitation, he dove back into the cold river and swam downriver. Luckily, the current was weak here, and he was able to overtake the capsized canoe and pull it to the bank where he tied it, still upside down, to a tree. He was untying the supplies from underneath and piling them on the bank when Jinni arrived.
“How about we camp here for the night,” Jeremy suggested.
“Sounds good to me,” Jinni replied. “I think we deserve a rest. Did we lose anything?”
“Don’t think so,” he replied. “Still got our paddles.”
Jeremy allowed his smile and gaze to linger as he studied Jinni’s appearance.
“What?” she asked as a little smile tiptoed across her lips.
“You look like a drowned rat,” he said, and their smiles grew into laughter.
The way her wet clothes clung to her was comical but Jeremy also couldn’t help but notice the way it revealed the curves of her body.
They pitched the tent on a suitable flat area on the river bank and hung up the wet contents of one of the bags that had leaked. They walked the short distance back toward The Devil’s Crotch and ran into the sheer rock wall that bordered the east side of the rapids. Forced to turn inland, they continued walking alongside the border of the wall, hoping to discover a route to the top.
“If we find a way, I imagine it will be quite a view from way up there,” Jeremy said.
“How high do you think it is?”
Jeremy tilted his neck skyward. “It’s a good bit higher than the tree tops. I’d say it’s at least 100 feet to the top, give or take.”
After about ten more minutes of steady walking, the wall made a 90 degree turn to the left – still they found no way to climb its sheer face. Moving parallel to the river, they came upon a crystal clear stream that ran alongside the base of the stone wall. They stopped at the point where the water gurgled down a small hole.
“I wonder where it goes?” asked Jinni.
“Who knows?” replied Jeremy. “I suppose it must empty into the river somewhere nearby.”
They followed the perimeter of the monolith around another left-hand corner and walked until they reached the river.
“Can you hear it?” Jeremy cocked his head to listen, thinking he had seen dogs strike this same pose when trying to pinpoint the direction of some faraway sound. “It’s The Devil’s Crotch,” he added with melodrama. “Now that we know what to expect, next time we should be able to make it all the way through without capsizing.”
Jinni looked at him in all seriousness and said, “There will not be a next time, not if I can help it.”
*****
Back at camp, they spent the balance of the afternoon sunning on the boulders along the riverbank and swimming in the cold water.
“Are we going to build a fire?” Jinni asked, as the towering rocks and trees served up an early invitation to the dusk. “If so, we should probably gather some wood.”
“I’m thinking not,” replied Jeremy. “Not tonight.”
Prior to his conversation of a few days ago with Grady, Jeremy considered himself a stanch unbeliever in the supernatural. How could one who fancied himself a rational scientist believe otherwise? However, he could not deny that a part of him wanted to accept that there could be something strange and unworldly here, something not readily explained. Wasn’t that the real reason he was here?
But what exactly did Grady say about this place? Jeremy wished he had paid more attention during the meal at Grady’s but he had been preoccupied with getting away. Primarily, Grady had said to stay away from Reefers Woods because of some unspecified danger, possibly the ghost of the hippie queen. He also mentioned something about objects of desire though Jeremy had no idea what that might mean. He did clearly remember one question Grady posed:
If your eyes could be opened to realities you never knew existed, would you want to see?
Apparently Jeremy’s answer to that question was yes, even with the stipulation that responsibility came with this knowledge. That had been the clincher. Simply advising Jeremy to stay away made him want to check it out. Who wouldn’t want to become cognizant of secret realms?
There were two reasons why Jeremy vetoed the campfire idea: to see, and to not be seen. A fire would provide illumination to the immediate campsite but would also give away their position to anybody (or anything) in the vicinity. Also, the light from the fire had a blinding effect that would prevent them from seeing anything lurking beyond its circle of light. It occurred to him that sometimes one must join the darkness in order to perceive that which is in the darkness.
The evening was uneventful. For a while they sat outside on a sleeping bag pad, but the moon had not yet risen and there wasn’t much to look at. There were, however, plenty of sounds to entertain, but as Jinni pointed out, these could be experienced just as well from inside the tent. And, as a bonus, they could escape the pesky mosquitoes that whined in their faces despite repeated applications of bug spray.
*****
At some point during the night Jeremy awoke. The diffused light that filtered in through the thin tent fabric seemed a little brighter than it should be.
Just the moonlight, he told himself. As he continued staring upward he thought he could make out a few pinpricks of light. The stars and moon are so much brighter out here, he thought. He rolled onto his side and shut his eyes but a wayward thought nagged his mind: Not moonlight, not stars: Something else.
Open your eyes.
Jeremy didn’t want to open his eyes. He wanted to sleep. His logical side, which tonight happened to agree with his sleepy side, insisted that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on. Not here, not anywhere. There are no devil dogs, no nymphs and no ghosts of dead hippies. There is only the natural. Supernatural is just another word for impossible. (There is no supernatural.)
But the other side of his psyche, the side that brought him out here in the first place, wanted to believe, indeed needed to believe that there was more to life than the mundane. (I can hope for more, can’t I?) Could he dare to hope that maybe, just maybe, he might one day (tonight?) look past ordinary and find extraordinary? Could the natural be superseded by the supernatural and normal by paranormal? Might those unlikely stories about Reefers Woods hold some truth?
Sleep or wake?
Jeremy opened his eyes. As he watched, the pinpricks of light multiplied and brightened and shone through the tent with crystal-clear clarity. It was as if the tent fabric were melting away, receding, blackening; becoming the canopy of the sky on which the stars were strewn.
Jinni needs to see this, he thought, and tried to tell her but, strangely, he could not manage even a peep. It was as if his vocal cords were paralyzed or perhaps nonexistent. Things got even more interesting when he heard the sound of children’s voices, like from a distant playground. Gradually, Jeremy became cognizant of an underlying, rhythmic quality to the clamor. Voices joined together, repeating words in unison, until their message could be discerned. The children were chanting, “Red rover, red rover, send Jeremy right over…Red rover, red rover, send Jeremy right over…”
As Jeremy listened to the words and watched the hypnotizing lights, a peculiar out-of-body sensation overtook him. Every other part of his surroundings – Jinni, the tent, the pillow under his head – faded from his awareness. The lights danced together and drew closer until his perspective changed and, as in a dream, he was flying. The chants became louder and the lights beckoned like unexpected runway beacons to a wayward pilot.
He landed like a bird on the rocky upper rim of the cliff that towered over the rapids of The Devils Crotch, the very place that he and Jinni had earlier tried in vain to reach. On the other side of that sheer rock wall, opposite the river, the landscape was molded into the shape of a crater, or, more accurately, a natural amphitheater. Metallic music wafted through the air. Gyrating
below was a huge crowd, mashed so close together as to appear as one humongous organism composed solely of heads and uplifted arms. Held above the hoard was a flickering sea of flames, born of Zippos and Bics.
A slight movement on the rock shelf caught Jeremy’s eye. With a jolt he realized that he was not alone. So still was she that he had not noticed the old woman crouched at the far side of the rock shelf, like a stone-statue gargoyle set upon the upper reaches of the edifice. For a breathless minute or more, he waited for her to acknowledge him, but it was as if he were invisible to her. She held her crouched posture and her gaze remained fixed on the abyss.
When Jeremy turned his attention back to the crowd, everything had changed. The crowd below had become a throng of luminescent creatures. The brilliant white light that emanated from within these winged beings lit up the rock walls of the amphitheater and the sky above. Jeremy watched, awestruck, as the glow grew larger and brighter until it became a giant ball of translucent white radiance. Beams of blindingly-bright light shot out in all directions, like from some supernatural disco ball. The intensity of the music rose in lockstep, thundering forth from the host in a song of such otherworldly beauty, power and grace, that he fell into utter love with it and the feelings it inspired in the depths of his soul. As he watched and listened with ecstatic awe, one of the beings broke free and flew up toward him. Closer and closer it came, floating as if suspended by invisible cables and glowing with the ubiquitous light.
Later, Jeremy would not recall any specific details of the creature’s face. He only knew that, like the music, it was wonderful and strange. He would, however, never forget the words that passed between them.
“The forecast calls for rain,” she said in an assured tone with a voice like that of a young child.
Jeremy hadn’t known what to expect from the angelic creature, but a discussion of the weather wasn’t it.
